| J.R. MIller | Page 4 |
There seems to be in this thought a suggestion for New Years or birthdays. We should not live any year merely as well as we lived the year before. There are people who really never advance in anything. They do their common task-work this year as they did it last, certainly no better. They keep the same habits, faults and all. They become not more intelligent, no more refined. They seem never to have a new thought, to learn a new fact, to become more useful among men. They grow no more patient, gentle, or sweet. They take no larger place in the community, count for no more, are no more useful among their fellows. They read no new books, make no advance in knowledge. Their conversation consists of the same old commonplaces, they tell the same little jokes over and over. In their religious life they do not grow. They know God no better, have no more trust in time of trouble, love no more, live no more helpfully, never get to know their Bible any better. They quote only the same two or three verses which they learned in childhood. If you hear them often, you will get to know their prayers by heart. They live the same pitiably narrow religious life at fifty, at sixty, which they were living at twenty. They simply go round and round the mountain, never climbing up to any loftier height as they journey. They never get the wider look they would get by ascending as they plod.
This is not the way to live. The message comes to us continually, “Ye have been going round this mountain long enough: turn you northward.” Northward for these pilgrims was toward Canaan, the new homeland. The wilderness was not their destination — it was only a road on which they were to travel, a region through which they were to pass to reach their land of promise, the good land of their hopes. So the call to us is northward, away from the common things into the higher and nobler things of life. We belong to God, and we should seek the things of God. We are risen with Christ, and we should seek the things of the resurrection life. Our citizenship is in heaven, and we should have our home there. We are called to leave the narrow life of our earthly state and turn northward.
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